Page 17 of Demon Loved
Belshegar had no real plans to explore Sedona and Prescott and Flagstaff, of course. Doing so would only take him away from the place where the artifacts had been hidden. During dinner the night before, he’d learned from Brianna that she would be working at a gallery down on Main Street for most of the afternoon, so he thought it shouldn’t be too hard to avoid her. All he had to do was stay in his room until he knew she was safely ensconced at the gallery, and then he would be free to move about the town without too much interference.
That was why he spent most of the morning engaged in meditation, allowing his mind and spirit to drift and, he hoped, gain some inner calm.
He knew he needed it after the dinner they had shared.
Ever since, he hadn’t been able to stop thinking about her — about the gleam of her beautiful blue eyes, the smoothness of her skin, those glorious golden waves of hair that fell about her shoulders. Never in his very long life would he have ever thought he might be attracted to a human. In all those hours he’d spent with Elena, he’d never once experienced even the slightest flicker of desire.
True, he’d met her when she was a very young girl, and if he’d had to explain their relationship in human terms, he might have said he was a protective older brother. But Elena had certainly grown up to be beautiful enough, and he still barely noticed, except perhaps to be glad that she’d found someone in Alessandro who admired both her inner and outer attractions.
Brianna, on the other hand….
It took some effort, but eventually he managed to banish her from his mind and to simply be. His consciousness ranged to the place he called home, and he saw that the gardens he’d tended so carefully still looked just as they always had, lush and full of colors that had never existed on Earth. Deep down, he knew those gardens would flourish without him, and he’d mainly taken care of them because tending the plants and flowers gave him something to do.
And when he came back to this plane and glanced over at the digital clock on the bedside table, he saw it was nearly two o’clock in the afternoon. Brianna would be at the gallery, and that meant he should be free to wander the streets of Jerome…as long as he avoided the block where her place of work was located.
The sky was once again bright and blue, the air warm. He donned human attire of jeans and a dark green T-shirt, got out a pair of sunglasses — even though he didn’t really need them — and prepared to sally forth to see what he could find.
The town seemed a little busier today. Was that because of the approaching weekend, or because people were coming to Jerome early for the folk festival that would begin the day after tomorrow?
Not knowing the usual rhythms of the place, he couldn’t hazard a guess. However, he believed the additional foot traffic could only be helpful, as he thought it might assist in concealing his movements.
The night before, he hadn’t seen any sign of the ghost that had appeared in his hotel room, but he’d sensed it moving around the building, along with others whose presences weren’t quite as easy to detect. He felt something of that now as he left the Grand Hotel and walked past a place called the Haunted Hamburger — apt, he thought, for that place had at least two or three resident spirits, possibly more — and continued on his way.
Jerome’s history had been a violent one, he’d learned from a brochure he picked up in the hotel lobby, one of gunfights and drunken brawls and crimes of passion. As the years wore on, it became a little more sedate, but blood had already been spilled here many times, and some of those victims — and perpetrators — had never found a way to move on to the next plane.
But the ghosts, while interesting, were not his main concern.
No, he needed to pick up the thread of the energy he’d felt the day before, a low thrum of magic that was entirely different from the powers he sensed whenever a witch or warlock passed him on the street. There were quite a few of them here, but he didn’t find that too strange, not when he was in the heart of McAllister territory. Their energy was bright and sparkling, not so different from champagne in its own way.
The other magic, though, felt more like a background hum, similar to the sound an old-fashioned car’s engine might make. Unfortunately, those pulses, while discernible to him, didn’t seem to emanate from any single place that he was able to detect.
By design, he was sure. Although Belshegar didn’t completely understand how humans used magic, he guessed whatever wards had been placed on the artifacts would have been designed to ensure that anyone looking for them wouldn’t be able to determine their exact location.
No, the only way he could trace them to their hiding place would be to discover whose home or other property concealed them. He guessed the witch the voice had described must be the prima of this clan — and the warlock her consort — since tradition held that the strongest witch of a particular generation was always the one to lead them.
Fine and good, but although he could sense witch powers, he wasn’t able to determine who among them was stronger and who was weaker.
And that meant the prima could have passed him on the street, and he would have been none the wiser. He might have been an extradimensional being, but that didn’t mean his powers were limitless.
Well, he would have to do this by means of simple deduction. If a prima was the head of her clan, then that meant she probably held some sort of first-among-equals status. Therefore, she would probably live in one of the nicer homes in town.
Even though Jerome was quite small, there was still a good bit of it that most people would never even know existed, since it seemed clear to him that the tourists generally stayed on its main streets, the ones that were basically a part of the highway before it continued up and over the heavily wooded mountain that towered above the town.
The question was, how could he poke around in the residential areas without someone wondering what he was doing there? Saying he was lost might work once or twice, but he had a feeling word would soon get out that a stranger was snooping around their homes, and his activities would be shut down by whatever means necessary.
Well, he’d told Brianna just the day before that his hobby was researching old ghost towns, so he didn’t think it would seem too strange for him to be inspecting the architecture of the various houses that had been built during Jerome’s boom times more than a hundred years ago. In fact, he would bring a sketchpad and some pencils with him to bolster his story. Although he would certainly never call himself an artist, he’d spent many years watching Elana draw and thought he could fake it well enough, to use an utterly human phrase.
He could have conjured the sketchpad and pencil, but it turned out there was a shop near the top of Main Street called McAllister Mercantile that sold the items in question. The credit cards he’d been given were loaded with so much money that he knew he could never spend it all, so he wasn’t too worried about purchasing such trifles. He noted at once that the pretty brown-haired woman working there that morning was a witch as well, and she gave him a cheerful smile and said she hoped he would have fun sketching the sights. Their exchange also played well into his plans, because if anyone made a comment about seeing him with the sketchpad, she could comment that she’d sold it to him.
All very normal, completely ordinary.
Once he was armed with his drawing supplies, he wandered down the street, passing the tasting room where he’d first met Brianna McAllister. The door was open, and he could see people inside, but there was no music, of course, not this early in the afternoon.
Still, he couldn’t help experiencing a pang when he saw the place, and wished he did not have to continue deceiving her as to who he was and why he was here in Jerome. But the voice could take away his pleasant home if it wished…could even end his very long life if it was sufficiently displeased with the work he was doing. Lying to Brianna, while uncomfortable, was certainly better than dying.
Wasn’t it?
His jaw tightened then — such a human reaction — and he forced himself to continue toward a neighborhood he’d noticed when he was wandering around the town the day before. Perhaps the prima and her consort wouldn’t turn out to dwell there after all, but he thought he had to start somewhere. Later on, if his search in this location didn’t bear any fruit, he would find a map of Jerome and see if there were other more likely streets he could search.
